Tag: class

So In Women Without Class By Julie Bettie

It’s interesting how the fact that people often mistake working class girl’s class membership identity signifiers as signifiers of sexual availability and promiscuity.  When in fact they have very little to do with sexual signifying, like the working class girls’ tight clothes and heavy makeup were to indicate which group of girls (and thereby which class) they belonged to, and it had very little to do with performing desirability and availability to boys.  In fact the working class girls were often less interested in heterosexual relationships and more likely to consider boys more trouble than they were worth.

I think a lot of these dudes who keep putting me on their porn blogs are seeing the stereotype of working class appearing women as hypersexual, and also not understanding the class identity part.  I mean also who does sex work?  Prole women.  

IDK

So I’m thinking about anti-capitalist SWERFs and how like 1. Their readings of anti-capitalist thought are shallow af 2. How even leftists (of a bourgeois or “respectable” proletarian type) often buy into bourgeois mythology about working class women, and their sexualities that plays into patronizing bullshit.

Like I think one of the reasons 19th century bourgeois feminists/moral campaigners were so concerned about sex workers was because A: It was a more attractive option than domestic work or factory work in many cases, meaning that it drew away potential servants, B: The desire to control and regulate social reproduction for capital, and C: As part of problematizing and pathologizing working class women to leave them eternally backfooted and having to prove they aren’t ‘the problem’ thus keeping feminist spaces controlled by the bourgeois

And like I think a lot of leftists, even important theorists have bought the “OUT OF CONTROL” or even “Mindless victims” bourgeois propagated myths about working class femininity

Like Beverley Skeggs touches sort of the edge of this issue in the introduction of Formations Of Class and gender but doesn’t cover it in depth.

So I Think Smug Bourgeois “Social Justice” Projects That Do The Whole “Working Class People Are Regressive and Must Be Reformed” Thing

May serve the function of keeping working class folks divided and punching down.

Like “Ohohohoh, working class men are such misogynist brutes, not like us good sensitive bourgeois men” is a great way to make working class men hostile to women’s issues because they associate their discussion with class injury and also by acknowledging a bunch of forms of oppression but not acknowledging class they make it easy to use the ol’ “You’re dealing with reverse sexism/reverse racism/heterophobia/cisphobia/etc and that’s why your life is crappy and the people calling you out on being oppressive are actually oppressing you” line to misdirect class related anger

And the especially fucked up thing is from a praxis related viewpoint working class men are much more likely to share childcare and domestic chores… and in my experience treat women as much more equal than bougie dudes do

Like working class femininity scares the fuck out of the bourgeois for some reason

the-moneyhungrywhore:

thepeacockangel:

Otherwise they wouldn’t expend so much time regulating and mocking prole women’s expressions of femininity, and so much time on policing prole men’s masculinity, like gnc dudes are only ever depicted at all if they’re bougie or villainous.

and like think about it, the effete aristocrat dude doesn’t scare them, doesn’t shock the system really, but street queens and the new york dolls are some rumbling revolutionary undercurrent that terrify people

Have u noticed how ugly old money fashion is? The classy modest style is always seen as the highest form of a woman respecting herself. But when the working class make up their own style old money starts to call them things like hoe and slut so theyll conform to their boring fashion standards

Like I think that it’s more than that by being the arbiter of what is “self respecting” and what is “tasteful” but also making that shit fucking complicated they prevent the incursion of outsiders but also regulate working class people and especially working class women’s behavior, also by putting working class women in the box of “sexually accessible” but also “promiscuous” and “not the sort a gentleman marries (because of her supposed promiscuity)” it makes working class women sexually accessible to bourgeois men, but also prevents working class women from marrying up into the bourgeois, and dissipating dynastic fortunes.

But like also by denigrating working class women’s expressions of femininity (because like the definition of femininity that currently reigns is something codified by the 19th century bourgeoisie, and they’re in a position of cultural authority) and telling us we’re getting femininity wrong I think like maybe like we’re put in a position of like A: Competing with each other for scraps of respectability 

B: By saying we’re an inferior or incorrect imitation of them they make it harder for us to recognize and value as ours culture that we’ve created, also by making it a matter of good vs. bad taste (and perpetuating the idea that style is purely individual and not connected to class) they perpetuate the myth that our status in society is because of personal failings rather than systemic injustice, and like taste is an especially good one because they can always adjust it to exclude things we do and cannot be objectively evaluated so we can never be sure we’ve “gotten it right” and it’s also harder to argue “No my taste IS GOOD” with someone who has that kind of social power over you.

C. By calling us excessive and unable to self regulate they cast righteous anger as evidence of our inferiority, and place us in the position of an endless self regulatory, panoptic project

D. By making us ashamed they make us quiet and obedient.  If we fear humiliation, we will be quiet.  By hypersexualizing and pathologizing working class women they make it harder for them to speak because to speak is to risk humiliation and makes it easier to dismiss them when they do.

E.  I think this is because working class femininity and the femininity of other oppressed groups if unleashed has profound revolutionary potential, I can’t quite explain why.  It may have something to do with patriarchal masculinity inherently being prone to recreating power structures that serve to preserve it, but also maybe femininity that isn’t of the socially approved (pure, bourgeois) kind involves a kind of difficult to regulate community and solidarity, like by enforcing masculinity on prole men, they’ve made emotional closeness harder to create and easier to regulate, femininity involves emotionality and close friendships, by creating something we must prove we are not (and we are guilty until proven innocent and then we’re still under suspicion) they create fear and strife.   They also make us deny our identity as working class women to avoid being categorized as deviant non-women (which makes it easy for them to turn working class men against us) which is a big obstacle to class consciousness.

Or like that’s what I think?

Like working class femininity scares the fuck out of the bourgeois for some reason

Otherwise they wouldn’t expend so much time regulating and mocking prole women’s expressions of femininity, and so much time on policing prole men’s masculinity, like gnc dudes are only ever depicted at all if they’re bougie or villainous.

and like think about it, the effete aristocrat dude doesn’t scare them, doesn’t shock the system really, but street queens and the new york dolls are some rumbling revolutionary undercurrent that terrify people

This Book On Working Class Women Makes Me Think A Lot Of Stuff About Class Consciousness and Womanhood

It gets into all the ways working class women get shat on by society, and all the shitty unpaid labour we’re made to feel guilty for not doing, and basically all the guilt and shame that gets piled on us. (The book is Formations of Class and Gender by Beverley Skeggs)

I think you don’t see more women in leftist movements a lot of the time because the class self consciousness societal messages force us to internalize make us too uncomfortable to admit we are and what that means, because the stigma around working class womanhood is SO nasty and intense.

Like for men admitting working class status doesn’t undermine their gender and can in fact be seen as enhancing masculinity (although prole men still exist in a subordinated and shitty position) whereas for women it calls womanhood into question and our class status means constant scrutiny of our sexual behavior, of our mothering, of our housekeeping,of our appearance, of everything, and working class women are utterly and completely pathologized as deviant, hypersexual, uncaring, vain (taking time for the self for the sake of yourself as opposed to for others), bad mothers, strident, demanding, unable to “keep a man” because of the aforementioned traits, essentially as pathological non-women, Lilith to the bourgeois Eve.

We’re utterly back footed, put on the defensive from day one, society sees us as a potential revolutionary threat, and so we are made to justify ourselves as decent, as respectable, as human every moment of every day.  Unconstrained working class femininity is seen as a profound threat to capitalist order, or there would not be so much effort put into repressing it.  Think of “teen moms” and “welfare mothers” and “sluts” (all class and often racially coded terms) being blamed for every social ill, for the collapse of society, and while society isn’t currently collapsing and if it is it certainly isn’t our fault,  I think that if we fight back against their attempts to guilt trip us and shame us into compliance and silence, working class women might just be able to collapse this mess of a society if we get together and try, and that would be a damned fine thing.

Looking at all these indie chicks

In their “fall in the north east” uniform skirt and leggings or skinny jeans, hip neutral coloured jacket, glasses and little boots with not too much heel, topknot optional, I see a version of myself from an alternate chronology. Maybe I would have ended up being one of them had a series of unpleasant circumstances not sent me off the rails and utterly away from respectability and their petite bourgeois cool and cultural capital. Theirs is an expensive sort of Bohemianism, a countercultural impulse in people whose ultimate respectability is a given. It allows the people to feel themselves to be rebelling against the system they perpetuate.